[GSBN] earthquake-proof adobe walls (GSBN Digest, Vol 16, Issue 11)

[RT]

On Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:00:05 -0400, <gsbn-request at greenbuilder.com> wrote:

>    4. Re: earthquake-proof adobe walls (Lorenzo Robles)

>  Many old constructions, as remote as colonial time, 3 or 4 centuries  
> old, stood well after all the sismic activity.  Walls were built of  
> adobe, with a wonderful reinforcement of cane, thin bamboo,  or split  
> bamboo . It worked with the same logic as rebar and concrete.
>
>  I saw a  very  old house in the center of Lima, that had some walls  
> pulled down for extension purposes, showing the long, hard and flexible  
> strips holding like a wide net the core of the adobe wall.


I don't know anything about earthbag nor adobe construction but ignorance  
has never stopped me from shooting off my mouth in the past so ...

I would venture that the tensile reinforcement that Lorenzo mentions as  
being useful in enhancing seismic resistance of adobe walls, would be a  
lot more effective if moved out from the core of the wall, to the  
extremities of the wall's cross section, for the same reason that rebar in  
concrete construction isn't placed that the core of the section ... and  
for the same reason why most people building with straw bales these days  
know better than to whack a truck-load of rebar pins into the core of an  
SB wall.

The bamboo exoskeleton techniques that have been developed for SB  
construction by YakWoman, Steens et al should be directly transferrable to  
adobe & earthbag construction, or so one would suspect.


-- 
=== * ===
Rob Tom
Kanata, Ontario, Canada
< A r c h i L o g i c  at  ChaffY a h o o  dot  C a >
(manually winnow the chaff from my edress in your reply)
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